The Light in the Deep

by Alcoac

Rapture Noir. Exiled Inspector Teddy Nuckles wasted not a single good thought when he set eye on the lumbering brute clutching a bag of blood on Opening Day of Rapture. He shot him. In the bag, a beautiful woman's severed head. Chief Sullivan orders him to focus on the Fontaine case, but Tenenbaum's autopsy brings up many a puzzle, including a link to German experiments in Poland.

2. Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

I stared at my audio diary in dread. The thought of pressing the big, red button and recording yet another meaningless reel was enough to drive me mad. It had my formal name and rank emblazoned on it, 'Theobald Nuckles. Investigator. Ryan Security Forces.' We were instructed by Chief Sullivan, supposedly on Ryan's own order, to record our ideas, hypotheses, even musings on the cases we were working. Never had to put up with any bullshine like this back in Philadelphia. The thought was that someday in the future, people would look back and reflect on the pioneering lives of the earliest citizens of Rapture. The only reflecting they would get from mine was the yards of unused magnetic tape shining up at them as they listened to all the nothing I had recorded for them. That's not to say I had not ever used the audio diary. A few times, I had left it on all the way to the end of an hour-long tape, letting it record me scratching at my little notepad with my pencil, and picking up people having conversations in the security offices. No chance Sullivan would check the tapes, so nothing to worry about there. To be honest, I found the diary's whirring sound soothing.

I pressed the red button, and as the soothing whir started, I began writing up my notes on the case. At this point, every detail floated and flowed together in my head, but it needed to all be written down as quickly as possible to make sure I didn't forget anything later, or start to mix things together when I'm dealing with multiple cases at once. It happens, even in Rapture. Working a case is like sailing, you can steer, but only with the wind to push you along. There's no telling when then wind would blow or in what direction.

The first thing I wrote down was a simple timeline of events for the incident. I set the start of the incident as the moment I first saw the brute slinking around the outskirts of the crowd in the large theater. He appeared threatening, and being in my patrol area, I followed him out into the passageway. I set the time for the shooting as well. I knew I would come back to this timeline as more and more details were revealed. At this point, details were limited at best. The clothing the brute wore was the same non-descript tawdry rags most of the working boys wore in Rapture. Down on Neptune's Pier or out to Pauper's Drop, there wasn't a soul could be found wearing anything otherwise.

The head was a different story. Deep red hair with curls and blue-eyed, she wore light robin's egg eye shadow and pale pancake makeup on her cheeks, with ruby lipstick on her lips that had begun to turn purple and congealed from rigor mortis. To be honest, the lipstick seemed familiar. Almost like the girls in Siren Alley, but more spiffed out. Her beauty peeked through the mutilation done to her, she was a cut above any of the call girls walking the plates down there – a real Sheba. Her neck had been severed from her shoulders cleanly, in a single strong strike that gave me the mental image of one of the French guillotines from a hundred years ago. From the looks of it, she had been in her mid-twenties. A person that age is only just beginning life. Her life had been stolen from her. I didn't even know her name, but I had to know why this brute had killed her. It wasn't a promise or an oath, it just burned deep inside, knowing I had to know, had to understand, had to stop it from happening again. I owed it to her.

I didn't have all the details yet on the brute's body. I was waiting for the autopsy results to come back from our examiner. Stole a glance at my watch and saw it was an hour since the autopsy had begun. Perfect. Everyone wore wristwatches or kept pocket watches down in Rapture, since there was no way to tell time otherwise without help of the sun. I'd heard some of the earliest workers saying they had begun to be able to mark time by the weather of the deep – when a school of tuna would swim over the city, the groaning on the foundations and bulkheads from the daily tide changes, even the sound of the bathysphere when the thermal layer came lower during the daytime hours, there was a routine to Rapture, just like anywhere else, once you got used to it. I made my way over to the ladderwell down to the medical compartment.